TookTook wrote:
Thanks for the results of your experiments - and good luck with the organic certification.
Should you feel like starting a thread on that topic I would be very interested to read it!.

Last night I used 10 4wk old normal 60-70g eggs & got same results leaving them in to cook 15mins then cooling under running water & peeling straight away. The shells broke in half with a slight tap on the sink & slipped right off.
Now regarding organic status TookTook, that is a nightmare!
I am having serious second thoughts about the certification process.
It seems due to having my horses I can't get certification on the whole property, so now we are concentrating on just the house yard, extended garden & orchard areas which includes the chook space.
I have a rental granny flat over in one part of my garden which is impossible to keep organic because people lie through their teeth about what they do, buy & use for cleaning, gardening & pet use.
I already have to keep the horses out of the house yard & orchard because it seems impossible to make them organic due to requiring worming every 3mths after faecal egg count is done. I used to let them in to trim the edges, etc but now have to use a brushcutter & do more mowing which is not in keeping with a non chemical MO.
Then there's the chooks. Again worming is a big issue since I just had to do them with moxidectin.
But the other thing I have learned is that when a flock of young pullets is installed in a paddock or specially cleaned barn, they get no real health attention for the duration of their stay. That theoretically makes them organic. Then they begin to get sick from all sorts of usual commercial chook related things so the whole flock is sent for processing & of course the farmer gets a premium because those birds are technically organic even though many of them may actually be very sick.
The only reason they are organic is because they are young enough to have not needed lots of chemical or medication intervention. That's how meat birds get to be organic.
That's not the way I want to do things here. I want my birds around for the duration of their natural life. I'm not having enough success keeping critters at bay inside the hen house to say I will never need chemical intervention. Certified Organic feeds are very expensive & I now know that I may not actually get what I pay for as some companies use imported components.
And so it goes on.
